Chinese Masseuse Plays Shuffleboard on My Ass

The night starts innocently enough. Seven of us, exhausted from a dance club the night before and a long day volunteering at a migrant school outside the city, decide to get a 10 PM massage at an “upscale” place in Beijing ($23 / 60 minutes).

When we arrive we are ushered downstairs into the salon/massage area by about 40 too many people. Chinese service industries live by the Powell Doctrine: they throw dozens of bodies at simple tasks. Overwhelming force. Unfortunately, few are trained in the basics of hospitality.

Four of us (three guys, one girl) are put in one room, three in the other. We are given shorts and a shirt to change in to, instead of a robe. There is no locker room or privacy barriers. Nor New Age music playing in the background. Nor even four beds; only one bed and three futons on the ground. The handlers kind of bow at us (Japan doesn’t have a monopoly on the bow) and leave us to change and get ready.

Just as I am about to drop trow, the door swings back open and more maids and managers run about in our room, moving around some sheets and trying to upsell the 90 minute option. They finally leave again. I change out of my clothes and hide my wallet in my t-shirt and put a water bottle on top of it so noise would be made if a masseuse tries to steal it.

The four masseuses enter the room dressed in pink. Mine is an overweight 40-something year-old woman.

I start by lying on my stomach. On a fucking futon. There is no hole near the top through which to stick my head, as is usually the case with bed massages, so my face and nose are jammed into the mattress as she begins to work on my back. At first it’s the usual Swedish shtick, but it takes only a few minutes to discover the Chinese way is different. No pain, no gain. If I spoke Chinese I would yell out for her to stop or ease up on the pressure on my back, but I’m a simple English speaker, and my face is stuffed into the futon anyway.

Every few minutes she stops inflecting pain on my back and grabs my ass, slaps it, and shakes it around as if she were playing shuffleboard. My three friends are also in the room — all our asses are being slapped around. It is crazy. Whack, slap, karate-chop. Everything. The sound of slapped asses echoes in the room.

Then she turns me over and I lie on my back. She offers me some tea at the halfway point in the massage. I sip greedily, burning my whole mouth as I always do.

Then she starts massaging me face-up. She sticks her fingers in my ears as if she were digging for ear wax. She presses on my veins in my arm and stops blood flow to the lower half of my arm. She massages my head by pressuring my sinus area to the point where one friend with me said afterward, “I was worried I was going to have a concussion.” She takes her two thumbs and rubs them together on my hand as if she were rubbing sticks together to try to create a spark for a fire. As I write this, my hand feels like it has been floor-burned.

Then, working recklessly with her hands, she moves to the groin area. It’s an area fraught with hazards. When my friend in the futon next to me starts laughing, and the masseuse laughs softly as well out of embarrassment, I know he had just been violated. The friend later confirmed: “Tip and some shaft.” My other friend, in the room over, also reported some foul play in the groin area: “A couple handfuls, at least.”

The massage ends. I open my eyes. The masseuse crouches over me and hands me a feedback form. Huh? 10 seconds after the massage ends I’m being asked to give feedback? I write, in English, “Nice job.” I hand it to her. She says something to my Chinese friend in Chinese. He translates: she finds it strange I write with my left-hand. Just another day in the life of an oppressed lefty.

We pay the bill, in the immortal words of Randy Moss, with straight cash. In China, you have no choice.

We step outside into the warm Beijing night, laughing and comparing notes, and hail a cab. When I get back to my room, I crave familiarity to recover from the trauma. So I grab my emergency jar of peanut butter.

Culinary knives do not exist in the land of the chop stick. I begin eating the peanut butter straight out of the jar using the handle of a disposable hair comb.

I once did a course of five Chinese massages with acupuncture (in London, so far from your experience). It felt like I’d been beaten up after every session. As soon as I’d healed, it was time to go back. $1000 later, I am wary of Chinese massages anywhere.

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Years ago I was skateboarding on the sidewalk in San Diego and went flying like Superman when I hit a wide crack.

I did the worst thing you could do– stiff armed myself to break the impact of collision with concrete.

The elbow of that arm swelled and was painful for a week, but nothing was broken so I ignored it and forgot about it.

About a year later, though, under heavy usage, it got sore and was continually aching.

I saw an ad for one free acupuncture treatment from a Dr. Wu, so I thought, what the hell, give it a try.

Went to his clinic– the waiting room was a barren, minimalist setup with a giant poster of the human body’s meridians of chi.

Sat there for a few minutes, was called into the examining room, whose most prominent feature was a paper-covered mattress on a piece of plywood supported by concrete blocks, with a paper towel on a down pillow.

Dr. Wu questioned me briefly, took a look at the elbow, told me to lie down and gestured to his assistant to do her business.

She proceeded to stick the autoclaved needles into my body.

I watched in amazement as she stuck two needles an inch deep into the inside wrist, three needles two inches into the inside of the elbow, and three needles in the shoulder to the hilt.

No pain whatsoever.

Then she looked me in the eye and said, “Tweh meh.”

I thought, “What the hell, I don’t speak Mandarin.”

Then I realized she was saying “Twenty minutes.”

So I lay there for twenty minutes wondering, “Wtf am I doing here?.”

Sure enough, precisely twenty minutes later, she came into the room and adjusted the needles, without pulling them out. Then she said, “Tweh meh.”

O.K.

Again, she returned, punctually, and rather than just pulling them straight out, adjusted their position radially, and it was another twenty minutes before they all finally came out.

No charge, just a thank you, and have never had a problem with that elbow since.

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Inglorious. Remember this experience if you ever make it to the Hotel Gellert in Budapest. It’s known for its baths and (supposedly) for its medical massages. I tried out both and the latter roughly approximated your experience, minus the manhood manhandling.

The Magyar mumbling man murdering my body did conclude with a spectacular move, though. Saying something clearly intended to be reassuring, he grabbed my head, and violently pulled it back and then twisted it left and right in about a quarter of a second. Every vertebrae and every part of my neck, skull and back exploded into flames of pain. He patted me reassuringly and left.

I was in such bad shape I had to stop on the walk back to the hostel, because I was limping so bad a pedestrian asked me if I had been hurt. It was gnarly, and that was the massage. I should tell you sometime about the unhelpfully amorous bisexual man in the baths…aye yi yi.

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